--- title: "AI Chronicle - Weekly AI Updates - MKM Labs" canonical: https://mkmlabs.pl/en/ai-chronicles/ last_modified: 2026-10-04 language: en-US --- # History of AI in Poland and worldwide > Interactive history of AI from 1943 to 2026: breakthroughs, AI winters and the LLM race, curated by MKM Labs for European businesses. The MKM Labs AI Chronicle presents the history of artificial intelligence from the first artificial neuron to modern language models, autonomous agents and developer tools. The timeline organizes the major eras, breakthroughs, winters and adoption waves, showing which events changed business, science and software development in practice. 80+years of AI history1943 - 2026 8eras of developmentfrom birth to AI-native 70+breakthroughsdiscoveries, models, events ## Origins The birth of artificial intelligence as an idea - from the first model of a neuron to a program impersonating a psychotherapist. Dreamers, mathematicians, and visionaries lay the foundations. ## The First AI Winter Disillusionment follows broken promises. Governments pull funding, scientists abandon the field. AI enters hibernation. ## Expert Systems AI returns in the form of expert systems - rule-based "if-then" programs. Corporations invest billions; Japan launches a mega-project. ## The Second AI Winter Expert systems prove brittle and expensive to maintain. Japan abandons its mega-project. But in the quiet, convolutional networks are being born... ## Machine Learning A quiet renaissance: statistics replaces symbolism. Deep Blue defeats Kasparov at chess. The internet supplies the data. Hinton thaws deep learning back to life. ## Deep Learning Deep neural networks explode onto the scene. AlexNet, AlphaGo, the Transformer - AI beats humans in one domain after another. GPUs plus big data equal revolution. ## The LLM Era Large language models change the world. ChatGPT reaches 100 million users. Claude, Gemini, Llama - the race accelerates. AI stops being an academic curiosity. ## AI-Native AI stops being a tool - it becomes a foundation. Multi-agent systems, Claude Code, vibecoding. Those who do not adapt to AI-native get left behind. ## Who led the pack? 2020-2026 Five players, dozens of models, a fight for the top spot in AI. Stars mark the models that were the best in the world at the moment of release. ## How has AI intelligence grown? 2020-2026 Estimated IQ equivalents for AI models based on benchmark results (MMLU, reasoning, coding, mathematics). AI does not possess IQ in the psychometric sense - these values are indicative only and serve purely to illustrate the pace of progress. Source: academic benchmarks, Arena, MMLU, HumanEval. Sources:[trackingai.org](https://www.trackingai.org)|[arena.ai](https://arena.ai/leaderboard)Estimates based on benchmarks, February 2026 ## Top 15 AI models in the world Ranking based on Arena (arena.ai) - March 2026. Arena measures user preferences in blind side-by-side comparisons, drawing on more than 6 million votes. Elo scores shift daily. The top 3 models sit within the margin of error. | # | Model | Company | Arena Elo | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | Claude Opus 4.7 (thinking) | Anthropic | 1512 | | 2 | Claude Opus 4.7 | Anthropic | 1510 | | 3 | Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | Google | 1502 | | 4 | Claude Opus 4.6 (thinking) | Anthropic | 1500 | | 5 | Grok-4.20 beta | xAI | 1493 | | 6 | Claude Opus 4.6 | Anthropic | 1492 | | 7 | GPT-5.4 Pro | OpenAI | 1490 | | 8 | Gemini 3 Pro | Google | 1485 | | 9 | GPT-5.4 (thinking) | OpenAI | 1483 | | 10 | GLM-5 | Zhipu AI | 1478 | | 11 | Grok-4.1 (thinking) | xAI | 1473 | | 12 | Gemini 3 Flash | Google | 1473 | | 13 | Dola Seed 2.0 | ByteDance | 1470 | | 14 | GPT-5.4 | OpenAI | 1468 | | 15 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Anthropic | 1460 | Source:[arena.ai/leaderboard](https://arena.ai/leaderboard)|[trackingai.org](https://www.trackingai.org)Data from March 2026 (approximate) ## Bielik - the Polish eagle among AI models The first Polish large language model, built by volunteers. A story that proves you don't need billions of dollars to build AI. ### From zero to 32 languages **2022:** The SpeakLeash Foundation (Spichlerz) emerges as a grassroots initiative. A group of volunteers - developers, researchers, and students - sets out to build the first genuine Polish LLM. They work evenings and weekends. **April 2024:** The release of Bielik 7B v0.1 - based on Mistral-7B, trained on 70 billion Polish tokens with its own APT4 tokenizer. The name comes from the white-tailed eagle (bielik) - a symbol of Polish nature. **2024-2025:** Evolution to 11B parameters (depth up-scaling), iterations from v2.0 to v2.6 with successive improvements. Bielik 11B v2.3 Instruct **beats GPT-3.5 by 21%** on Polish-language tasks. **July 2025:** Bielik 11B v3 - a multilingual model supporting 32 European languages. The smaller variants (1.5B and 4.5B), based on Qwen2.5, compete with models 2-3× their size. ### Bielik by the numbers Parameters1.5B → 11B Training tokens400B Cyfronet GPUs450 cards Languages (v3)32 European vs GPT-3.5 (PL)+21.2% better ### Bielik vs PLLuM **Bielik** = community. Built by SpeakLeash volunteers with Cyfronet AGH. Open source, no state budget. **PLLuM** = state. A government model (14.5M PLN), six research institutions, 12B-70B models based on Llama. Deployed in the mObywatel app and public administration. Together they form a complementary ecosystem for Polish AI. More: [speakleash.org](https://speakleash.org) · [HuggingFace: speakleash](https://huggingface.co/speakleash) · [HuggingFace: PLLuM](https://huggingface.co/CYFRAGOVPL) ### Fun facts 🧠 GPT does not "understand" language - it predicts the next token in a sequence. 💰 Training GPT-4 cost an estimated ~$100 million. 80% of that cost was energy and GPUs. 🔢 The human brain has roughly 100-600 trillion synapses. The largest AI models have a few trillion parameters - still 20-100× less than the brain. ⚡ The NVIDIA H100 is the "new oil" - it dominates the GPU market for training AI. ## Want to be part of this story? MKM Labs builds with AI as the foundation. Join the companies that do not wait for the future - they create it. [Start an AI project](https://mkmlabs.pl/en/contact/) About the AI Chronicle The MKM Labs AI Chronicle is an interactive **history of artificial intelligence** - from the McCulloch-Pitts neuron of 1943 to the latest **AI news** and the race of large language models (LLMs) in 2025 and 2026. We track breakthroughs in **deep learning**, the emergence of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other models, as well as AI updates on regulation, business applications and industry transformation. The timeline spans 8 epochs: from symbolic beginnings, through the AI winter, the deep learning explosion, to the era of **large language models** and autonomous AI agents. Each entry in the chronicle describes an event, its significance for the industry, and its consequences for today's **artificial intelligence market**. A comprehensive source combining the history of AI with current AI updates on a single timeline. ## Consult your project with MKM Labs Learn the history of AI - and start shaping it. Talk to us about automation and AI agents for your business. [Contact us](https://mkmlabs.pl/en/contact/) · [Our services](https://mkmlabs.pl/en/services/) --- **Source:** https://mkmlabs.pl/en/ai-chronicles/